


A New Beginning

by Agnol117



Category: Star Wars
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-07
Updated: 2016-01-07
Packaged: 2018-05-12 10:02:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5662264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Agnol117/pseuds/Agnol117
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Han Solo has always viewed his life as a series of endings and beginnings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A New Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> I pretty much cherry picked which parts of canon (both current canon and Legends canon) I wanted to use.

When he was feeling introspective, he viewed his life as a series of endings. Some were happy, some were sad. Most just were. He remembered the day he stopped thinking he’d be stuck in Corellia’s shipyards forever, when his parents had surprised him by revealing they’d scraped together enough for him to attend the Imperial Academy. He remembered when he threw away all his dreams of being an officer in the Imperial Navy to free a helpless Wookiee, and the day his military career officially ended as he stood trial for court martial for attacking a superior officer. But that, like all other endings, had lead into a new beginning. Gone was Lieutenant Han Solo of the Imperial Navy, but Han Solo the smuggler and his first mate Chewbacca were born. And after one lucky Sabaac game, even that came to an end, though not quite the way he’d expected. Sure, he was still a smuggler, but he wasn’t just a smuggler anymore. He was the smuggler, the pilot of the _Millenium Falcon_ , the ship that made the Kessel Run in under twelve parsecs, the best smuggler Jabba the Hutt had ever known in all his centuries as a crime lord.

  
Then, well, one desperate moment accepting a too good to be true job, and even if he didn’t know it at the time, that was the end of Han Solo, Legendary Smuggler, and the start of General Han Solo, Hero of the Rebellion.

There was one more ending, not too long after that, that was definitely a happy ending. The end of Han Solo. Standing under the canopy of trees on the forest moon, Han Solo was married and became Han Organa. He was no longer Solo, he’d said. It was a terrible joke, but Leia had been laughing so hard that they’d had to wait for her to calm down to continue the ceremony. He still smiled when he thought of that day. It was a happy memory, and there seemed to be so few of them these days.

Not since Dantooine.

The news had only come a few days ago, dropped off with the small blue astromech droid known as R2-D2. He hadn’t heard the story first hand. He’d been out at the time, doing reconaissance on the First Order. Leia had never trusted that they were peaceful, that the Empire had just faded off into the Unknown Regions without a fight. What they’d found wasn’t comforting, but wasn’t exactly threatening, either.  
The base had been quiet when he returned. Really, that should have been the first hint. The base was always busy, always had that murmur of people being busy somewhere in the background. But that day had been different. He’d gone to find Leia, as he always did when he returned. He found Artoo before he’d found her. While he didn’t actively dislike droids, he didn’t have much use for them either, but he’d always had a soft spot for the astromech, and he was pleased to see him. More than anything, though, he was pleased because if Artoo was here, then so was Luke. And if Luke had returned, then Ben was probably with him. After all, the last time he’d seen his son — god, had it really been three years since they’d actually been on the same planet? — Ben had bragged that he was Luke Skywalker’s first Padawan. He’d been so proud. Muttering a greeting to the droid, Han’s pace quickened. It was only when he thought about it later that he’d realized that by then, Artoo was already in low power mode. The droid had never even heard him.

The quarters he shared with Leia were dark when he got there, despite it being midday. That wasn’t entirely unusual, though. Leia had an entire resistance to run. She slept when she got the chance, even if her son and brother were visiting. He called out for her, for Luke, for Ben, but no one answered. Perhaps they were out, then. D-Qar was Ben’s home, after all, and he hadn’t seen it in years. Maybe they’d gone site seeing. Then he’d heard the noise. He followed it to find Leia, curled up on the floor of the room that had once been Ben’s, clutching a stuffed animal that he’d brought his son home from one of his missions. He remembered Ben leaving it here when he’d gone off with Luke. “I’m going to be a Jedi, dad. Jedi don’t need toys.” That had broken his heart more than watching his son leave.

“Leia?”

“They took him, Han. They took our son.”

It took him a few hours to piece together the full story, as it had been relayed to Leia by Artoo. Luke had sent Ben out to construct a lightsaber. His own lightsaber, a rite of passage for any Jedi. When he came back, he had a lightsaber. A red one. And he wasn’t alone.

They called themselves the Knights of Ren, whatever that meant. Led by their son, these “knights” assaulted farmsteads and villages, cutting a path across the planet to Luke’s school. Luke went out to stop them, but it was a trap — no one was there when he got to their alleged location, and he returned too late, finding Ben, now calling himself Kylo Ren, standing among the corpses of his students. They fought, and Luke drove them off, but he didn’t — perhaps couldn’t — kill his nephew.

He couldn’t decided if that was a good thing. His son was alive, yes, but he’d fallen to the Dark Side. That doubt gnawed at him.

 

For a few days after that, he and Leia had kept busy, throwing themselves into their work, and had barely seen each other. He wasn’t sure if he was avoiding her, or her him, but it amounted to the same. They were busy with their own work, and their eyes just seemed to slide over the other when they were in the same room.

Before her breakdown, Leia had called in all her owed favors, sent out every agent she had, and information was now pouring in. Information about the First Order, information that made Han’s mission a few days back seem like he’d been fed false information. They’d been fiercely militarizing, colonizing new planets, developing new weapons. All under the leadership of someone called Supreme Leader Snoke. Information about him was scant, and oftentimes contradictory, but some things were concrete: he was strong with the Force, with the Dark side, and he had ties to the Knights of Ren. He was the one who’d seduced Ben. Who knew how long he’d been in contact with his son? How long he’d spent whispering in his ears, telling him lies about the Dark Side? That knawed at him, too.

He’d known, when he married her, that Leia was Vader’s daughter. But he’d dismissed that fear. Vader was dead, and his spectre wasn’t going to haunt their child. But had he? Had it been fate, that he’d turned? Or had it been his fault? Should he have been more attentive, made more of an effort to be a part of Ben’s life regardless of his Jedi training? No matter how he thought about it, what line of reasoning he used, he always came back to one central question: was this his fault?

That, perhaps, was how he’d ended up here, in the cockpit of the _Millenium Falcon_. It seemed inevitable. It felt like it had been calling to him since he’d first heard the news; a quiet nagging in the back of his mind that only got stronger as time went on. Eventually, he’d run out of things to force himself to do, and one night, when Leia wasn’t around — she was busy, always busy — he’d found himself here, almost without thinking about it. Chewie was waiting for him there, as if he’d known.

“You don’t have to come with me.” It was an empty protest. Chewie had sworn a life debt to him. He’d come. He’d feel he had to, no matter how much he hated Han for doing it. And the anger was there, and it was obvious. The silence between them was familiar, but it was anything but comfortable, but Han bore it. He knew he deserved it.

He’d put out feelers to find some jobs almost before they were even off planet. One couldn’t be a smuggler without something to smuggle, after all. He was almost surprised by how fast he got responses. But then, when you were a legend coming out of retirement. He was starting over. This was a new beginning. He was, after so long, Han Solo again.


End file.
